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The Willingness of Non-Industrial Private Forest Owners to Enter California’s Carbon Offset Market

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Abstract

While non-industrial private forest landowners have a significant amount of forest landholdings in the US, they are underrepresented in the California cap-and-trade market forest offset program. Additional participation could benefit both the market and non-industrial private forest landowners. We developed a mail questionnaire which served as both a survey instrument and outreach tool about the market. Questions covered forest ownership objectives, landowners’ future plans for forests, views of climate change, and attitudes and intentions regarding forest carbon offset project development. We sampled from five Northern California counties for a total of 143 usable surveys. Three different groups of landowners were identified based on their management objectives: amenity (including protecting nature and recreation); legacy (passing land to children and/or maintaining a farm or ranch); and income. Landowner objective groups differed on several key variables, particularly related to potential motivations for joining the market, while all landowners expressed concerns about protocol requirements. Regardless of ownership objectives, over half expressed that receiving revenue from their forests would be an important motivator to join, though most were unwilling to satisfy protocol requirements, even after learning of the potential benefits of program participation. Thus, participation appears to be limited by the costly and complex project development process, as well as a lack of landowner awareness. Extending these lessons, we assert that different landowners may approach payment for ecosystem services programs with different needs, awareness, and motivations, which provide important lessons for those who conduct landowner outreach and for PES program designers.

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Notes

  1. There are currently two other US forest project types: avoided conversion and reforestation.

  2. All percentages presented in results are valid percentages, which exclude missing responses. N values represent the total number of valid responses for each question.

  3. Though 12 acres was smaller than our sample frame, the one respondent who had this acreage indicated their land had been subdivided.

  4. We switched the axes from their original form on the questionnaire in order to be consistent in the results.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to the many landowners who completed our survey, and especially to the experts who reviewed the survey. This material is based on work supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture McIntire-Stennis program, accession number 231837.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forestry and Wildland Resources, Humboldt State University, 1 Harpst St., Arcata, CA, 95521, USA

    Erin Clover Kelly

  2. Department of Psychology, Humboldt State University, 1 Harpst St., Arcata, CA, 95521, USA

    Gregg J. Gold

  3. Redwood Parks Association, 1111 Second Street, Crescent City, CA, 95531, USA

    Joanna Di Tommaso

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  1. Erin Clover Kelly
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  2. Gregg J. Gold
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  3. Joanna Di Tommaso
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Correspondence to Erin Clover Kelly.

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Kelly, E.C., Gold, G. & Di Tommaso, J. The Willingness of Non-Industrial Private Forest Owners to Enter California’s Carbon Offset Market. Environmental Management 60, 882–895 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0918-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0918-0

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